Not Now, Not Ever
by Elyan White
Summary: A close call leaves Kanda on the verge of death, speaking through the veil with an old teammate.


The church was silent and empty when the traveler pushed his way through the tall wooden doors, but the chapel was ablaze with candles. The rags of his cloak whispered over the floor of the threshold, weak sunlight leaking in the door behind him, and there in the vestibule he stopped to breathe awhile in the solemn hush. He shrugged off his hood in respect, loosing a shock of red hair that shamed the clusters of fiery light with its vibrancy.

Four years ago, the man who had once been called Lavi wouldn't have understood the significance of candles burning atop altars draped in the rose cross, but almost a year after leaving the Black Order, he looked at them and wondered which of the Exorcists had died.

His heavy boots tracked the path the survivors would have taken, back from the battlefield no one would ever know about and over the floorboards that creaked with the good nature of repeated use, past the old pictures of saints and angels, and under the arches of the ceiling to the spot where they would give the waiting Father their access code and the bad news.

The traveler still remembered the codes for every single Ark gate, and every priest whose hand he had drawn the numbers into, though in four years he didn't expect any of those things to be the same anymore-the Order was too careful for that.

After all, if he hadn't known it existed, then even he wouldn't have been able to recognize the signs of its presence most of the time. He still caught himself looking too hard at black jackets and people in mourning, watching in case there was a chance of danger he couldn't be a part of, or in case he might be confronted by a friend of Lavi's.

(Or in case he could see them again?)

The traveler sighed out the air he'd breathed from roads all over the world, and it seemed the whole building sighed with him.

And that was when he saw the Exorcist.

He cautiously approached the man at the altar, wondering if this was what it was like to dream, since Bookmen rarely did. Bandages and black ink, a coat cut long with a sword slung over one shoulder, midnight hair hanging free-his Bookman eye took it all in at a glance.

"Yuu."

"Lavi."

He expected a reaction, but after the years of forgetting, Kanda Yuu had no anger left for him. Exorcists didn't dwell. Neither did Bookmen, or so they said.

He stopped himself just shy of standing at his shoulder and said those words again in his head.

"…Kanda."

" _Bookman_."

He swallowed, the candles (all forty of them) smearing in front of his eye. He wasn't sure the matter of _him_ was so black and white, though maybe for Kanda it was.

"Paying your respects?" he asked, dredging up a smile. There was a one in fifty chance it would be the one Kanda recognized.

Kanda scoffed.

"You can't pay a dead man anything."

Well, that was Kanda, he mused dryly. Unexpectedly enlightening, but more like an oncoming train then a good read. He'd missed that and he hadn't-seeing Kanda and talking to him and _being_ here felt almost unreal, in a way he equated nervously with being caught in Road Camelot's illusion world back on the Ark. Much like then, he felt constrained by an ugly snarl of conflicting emotions and desires, and he knew that _this_ was why Bookmen didn't look back.

(But then, hadn't it always been like that with Yuu?)

He cleared his throat a little, trying to remember if his "Lavi" voice was supposed to be here in his throat, or up towards his nose-?

"Well, then. What brings you here? I know you're not really the religious type."

They both knew what a joke that was. The Exorcists fit picture-perfect in churches, with their quiet dignity and their strange, holy air of _other_ , but for all his wars the red-headed recorder had never met a group so predisposed to detest God.

"I came because I knew you'd be here."

He blinked. "How'd you…?"

"Che."

If Kanda had been in his blind spot, then Lavi would have missed his reaction completely, but he caught the flash of his teeth in an angry grimace and the toss of his head, like an impatient warhorse ready to trample him iron-shod into the dirt.

"Bookmen follow death like vultures," he growled, with the particularly nasty edge he usually reserved for strangers. "Your stink was all over this town."

Kanda finally cut him a glance at that, hard, gray slate and utterly blank. Blank like parchment, like a history unwritten.

 _Like a Bookman_.

The one who was neither Lavi nor Bookman allowed his eye to trace the four new years of exhaustion in his old comrade's face that hadn't been there before, and it came as a pathetic sort of surprise to him that, in his absence, Kanda's short march to death had carried on like a river wearing its course. _He_ didn't think of the strange and unfathomable thing that could never quite be communicated between them, if he ever thought of him at all. Kanda looked straight ahead at the war and the oblivion waiting at the end of it, while the former Bookman's apprentice became the ouroburos, his resolve hungrily swallowing the tail of his regret (or was it the other way around?)

How ridiculous it was that he, who could wear any face, would be the one trapped in the limbo of what might have been and had _almost_ been, thinking and thinking and nearly mad with it all these years.

He turned his gaze back to the altar with the sputtering flames for another dead man. There had surely been many of these after "Lavi" had left-so, so many. His departure had not made the world he'd left behind stop and lay down where it was simply because he wasn't there to see it, though he hadn't thought of it before.

"Yuu," he said before he could stop himself, "It wasn't one of ours, was it?"

The silence and the stare Kanda Yuu gave him were baleful. He wasn't sure he would answer, at first, but grudgingly he did.

"One of the nameless. Some green Exorcist who didn't last two months. None of your _friends_. Although," he added, angry and concise, "I don't know why you care. It could have been me, and you wouldn't have had any idea."

The man who was not an Exorcist allowed himself a very selfish gladness. He thought that perhaps he had become more selfish since becoming a Bookman, more self-centered when he should have been broadening his view. But he also thought that maybe it was a sign of his profession, that he didn't even try to care for the Exorcist Kanda called "nameless".

Bookman that he was, his thought progression snagged on one of Kanda's unspoken details. Had he truly believed this whole time that Kanda was alive, simply because he had not known he died? He felt like he should be surprised.

 _Nah_ , Lavi would have said. _Of course it wouldn't be you-Yuu's too mean to die_.

But he was no longer Lavi.

"You're right," he said. "It could have been you. Your lotus…"

 _Your life._

"Will it be…soon?"

Kanda's appraisal came and went like a frost over him.

"Soon," he said shortly, crossing his arms and staring hard into the small lights that begged for God's attention. _Too soon_ , or _not soon enough_ -knowing Kanda, he might have meant both. He wondered about the others, but he didn't dare say Allen or Lenalee's names-better, he thought, to let them be a part of the "nameless".

"It won't be you, though, will it." Kanda jerked his chin toward the candles, his tone bland. "That won't ever be you."

"For a Bookman?"

The so-called Bookman barked out a laugh that tasted of steel.

"No Exorcist funeral for me. We Bookmen leave our bones behind-there's no one around to record the recorders."

He had the vague impression that he was trying to keep ahold of something that was slipping rapidly out of his grasp. There were a thousand things he wanted to ask Kanda- _if I die, will you ever know? Would it mean more if I was shipped back to you in a shiny box than if I rot at the roadside? Would you light me a candle if you knew I was gone further than just outside your vision?_

 _Four years ago, would your answers be any different?_

Lavi didn't know what he was looking for. Bookman didn't know what he was looking for. He…didn't know which one was looking for it. But he was sure it was that same thing that he'd looked for in Kanda the day he left.

Kanda had been the only one he'd told he was leaving. Bookman had allowed it, sending him away with a flick of his metal-capped fingers and a slant to his heavy old brow that said, _you and your obsessions, boy_ _,_ because that was what Bookmen had-obsessions. Kanda had simply held out a hand for his Innocence, and when Lavi had pressed it into his palm, feeling the familiar warmth of both and waiting for Kanda, Innocence, God, _something_ to strike him down, Kanda had pocketed the Innocence and left for Hevlaska's chamber without a word. No words, no sound, no reaction. Nothing.

And he didn't call him back. Instead, he watched him go and tried to figure out why it felt like "Lavi" was already gone.

But even before that, there had been those signs. Signs of…detachment. Times where, no matter how far Lavi pushed or how hard he needled, he couldn't make Kanda give way to vulnerability or emotion-not even anger, which was his standard offense and defense.

He thought back to one of those times, back before Kanda had known to call him "Bookman" and mean it, in a surreal after-battle calm when he was wearing more bandages than clothing, leaving gray-black smudges on someone's white sheets while he waited for the adrenaline jitters to wear off. Sixteen year-old Kanda, his partner for the mission, slunk in the door like a shadow, completely untouched and likely trying to avoid medical attention. He gave Lavi a hard once-over, and then wrinkled his nose at him-which, like everything else about him, was sharp, pointed, and angry.

Lavi raised his eyebrows in amusement and struggled not to laugh outright. "What, do I smell like ashes, Yuu?"

"No. Like fire."

Maybe there was more adrenaline in his system than he'd realized, because Lavi flashed back to the roaring fire-snakes and the violent brilliance of the battle and he did laugh, unexpectedly. "Fire? I'm pretty sure that's still ashes."

"You'll be ashes one day," Kanda responded with morbid certainty.

"Fire that is going to be ashes," Lavi reiterated. "Gee, Yuu, that's real dramatic of you and all, but isn't it a little redundant?"

"Quit calling me that," he snapped instead of answering.

Lavi widened his eye and feigned ignorance. "But it's your name, isn't it?"

"'Lavi' isn't yours," Kanda said sourly back, and silence struck like a snake.

He'd had no idea how right he was at the time, but a year or so down the road, their half-functional slightly-more-than-working relationship had had enough outbursts of screamed admissions and broken something-or-others for Kanda to know it, and from then, he never brought it up. Lavi had wondered why, at times, but Kanda allowed him to be "Lavi" and himself to be "Yuu", so he left it alone. That was how they communicated-not just interacted, but truly _communicated_ , in that way they had that made Lavi worry about the implications. It was either with honesty or silence, and if it couldn't be one it had to be the other. They either shared truths, or they didn't share at all.

He supposed in some way he-both of them, probably-had wanted something to go wrong. It was why Lavi had pushed so hard to get closer, why Kanda had even allowed it in the first place: they both expected the trust they placed in people to be turned back on them as a weapon, or for the people who said they wanted to know them to give up or lose interest. But that was not what happened with them.

The game of push-and-pull-away stopped being a game when neither of them stopped playing, and instead started to be something that Bookman shook his head at and that led to a number of indiscretions on both of their accounts. They'd been…friends. Close. Closer than they should have been.

The new Bookman recalled exchanges between them very like this one, knowing without saying and saying without meaning, and he regretted so hotly and suddenly that he was surprised at himself-for though he was a recorder of secret histories, _these_ secrets were never recorded. They were unimportant to all but them, and in this Kanda was vindicated, for there was no one else in the world who had reason to care.

But then, if that was true, which of course it was, then the man with no name realized he had to ask.

"Yuu, why did you really come here? Why did you come find me?"

In the high-ceilinged quiet the sound of it hung stagnant, and Kanda took his due time analyzing the words. The candles flickered before him, but the light only made his face darker.

"Because I had to make sure," he said at last.

"Sure of what?" He hung on the silence, and realized for the first time that there was something he wanted to hear from Kanda.

"I had to make sure you weren't going to do something stupid."

"What-"

"You aren't a part of the Order anymore."

Short, clipped, standoffish, and that was all he had to say. Never one for poetics, was Yuu. But he didn't need to be-his honesty had always hit him the hardest. Kanda was glaring at him in a way that said he wasn't the only one remembering, but it didn't quite seem genuine. Or maybe he just wasn't that person anymore. But all the same, all at once, in this moment that was swelling like a drop of water about to break away and fall from him, he (Lavi, Bookman, both) wanted to blurt out to Kanda everything he missed and what Lavi dreamed about (since Bookmen didn't).

And the knowledge of impulse burst upon him like gunfire in the church, like the first time he'd ever held Innocence.

 _I cared_ , he wanted to tell him. _I want you to care_.

For a Bookman, it wasn't such a small thing. He turned his eye wide to Kanda, yet even with his epiphany lancing like light through his veins (hard light, dry light), he couldn't speak. Kanda wouldn't listen, and the pinched corners of his eyes told him so, because Kanda looked like a Bookman should-ready to leave.

He stared at the floorboards in something like shame, and reluctantly, like a bubble dislodged through a great, murky sludge, one more bitter memory came to the surface of thought.

It was a memory where he'd been laughing, low and a little bit harsh, the way only Kanda and Bookman and (once) Allen had heard. He'd been laughing just to Kanda, in a windowless corridor where they had just passed by-or passed _through_ , because Lavi always mingled, was always a part of everything, was always an insider-a pack of Finders talking about what they would do if they ran into a Noah. The answer, from Lavi's perspective, was _die_ , of course, but the wry, cheery way his persona said it made them think it was a joke. He'd thought it was funny that they'd thought it was funny, in the same way that Kanda had thought it was pathetic. Kanda certainly wasn't the type to tell him off for it like Lenalee would, but then, Lavi would never _say_ something like that to Lenalee. Kanda hated Finders, for one of the very same reasons he claimed to hate Lavi-they had joined the Order of their own free will, and in Kanda's eyes had no right to complain or beg protection from the Exorcists who had never had a say.

That was why his arms-crossed, self-contained seething after the event was unusual.

Lavi walked a little ahead, Kanda making a point of not changing his pace so that they remained separate, and threw a casual glance back at him over the folds of the scarf he adored so much.

"What, d'you feel bad for the Finders? Isn't it better they laugh about it instead of being afraid all the time?"

Lavi knew full well that the answer was "no", to both of those questions, just like Kanda knew full well he had only asked them to tease the real answer out of him. Kanda hesitated to speak, inasmuch as Kanda ever hesitated to do anything. Most might have assumed he was just having a particularly stony pause.

"You're always lying," Kanda said when it was over. "Always laughing everything off, like you think it's a joke."

Lavi feigned interest with the outside view the way he automatically did when evading truthful confrontation, only to be reminded there was no window to conceivably see it from and have to turn his face back to the corridor like he'd meant to all along. The smile stayed on the whole time, though.

"I only joke about permanent things, Yuu."

"Nothing is permanent," he growled back. "I'm not. You're not."

 _We're not_.

"You lie and no one calls you out. No one bothers. And you know it, damn you."

"Aw, but that's what you love about me," Lavi said with a drawl that was almost not Lavi.

"No," Kanda had corrected, "that's what _you_ hate about me. You can't stand it when I see through you. You hate me for that."

And at Lavi's near recoil, confused at how Kanda was candid and cruel without malice, he had tilted his head in a gesture that was so unrecognizable to him it seemed animalistic, and his eyes had been both cold and lightless. " _I_ can't stand it when you lie to me. And lying is all you ever do."

He'd never said whether or not he hated Lavi. Now he thought that maybe he had just never cared.

Back in the present and no longer Lavi, he noticed that one of the candle wicks had burned down into its wax, a single dim spot in the field of prayers. He wondered how he hadn't noticed the moment it went out despite looking right at it.

Kanda didn't notice, or care. "I'll kill you before you come back to the Order," he said, and then he wheeled precisely to his left, away from him, and walked out of his life as surely as Lavi had walked out of his.

It was a dismissal more than anything, and it sent him right back to Road's dream construct, time ago. But this wasn't the Kanda who had screamed oaths to his name and called him a traitor before he plunged his sword through him, this was the calculating, empty-eyed figure who had worn Lavi's face when he stood over him, too apathetic to even hate him, watching him and waiting for him to disappear into the water.

But this time Kanda wasn't watching him. He had just found him, seen him, heard his voice- _remembered_ him, and now here he was watching his high, straight shoulders under their black and red facing away from him, and his ebony-blue hair shadowing the man who was no longer there, exactly like four years ago and leaving the Order and becoming the Bookman.

It bit into him like frost into his soul, but Kanda had so compartmentalized the issue that there was no room for Lavi to come back into his life.

 _I'll kill you before you come back to the Order_.

The doors opened and then closed, and once again, he got the feeling that Kanda was the one leaving him behind, not the other way around.

And once again, he didn't go after him. And he knew that he could not. He dropped down with bones as heavy as his soul into one of the old, groaning pews, their wood warmed by the window of sunlight that had passed them over already, and dropped his forehead against his knuckles to think, as Bookmen did. He wondered if things would have been different if it had been Allen or Lenalee or even Krory-what he might have said, what they might have said to him. He wondered how far Kanda had gone out of his way to prevent those very things from happening.

In this time, it must have looked very like he was praying, but if Lavi had prayed to anything…well, his faith wore a black coat and had just walked away without a backward glance.

Bookmen didn't stay, but this one sat awhile alone in the pew, counting the candles as they died and silently, sorely measuring his loss against what he had never had.

He only ever saw Kanda Yuu one more time, and it was the very last time that his name ever appeared in the Bookman records. The people of the Black Order called him _unfortunate_ , and a _tragedy_ , and _good riddance_ , but the man with the red hair didn't call him anything.

He brushed by the coffin, draped in the white banner with its silver cross that could have been a star. The whispers and cries surrounded him, from people who would never know him, alive or dead.

"What's another dead Exorcist," said one that could have been Lavi, before he was Lavi.

But there was no "Lavi" left in the world anymore. He lingered, for a moment, in a crowd of people that might have known him once, but he didn't stay. Bookmen never stayed.

He left his silence there, and it was his confession. It was the only one that Kanda Yuu would have listened to.

* * *

 **Finally. Here's some Kanda and Lavi being ambiguous and depressing for your enjoyment. I decided I needed to get this off my laptop before I really got into the newer chapters of Hymns for Dead Hearts, but there are still several smaller projects sitting around my hard drive that will probably pop up here and there.**  
 **Tell me if this one's too rambly, too weird, too uncomfortable, too out of character-I'm always looking to become a better writer! I'd appreciate any feedback you can give.**  
 **Anyways, cheers! See you in HfDH!**


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